Former Kansas Player Claims Coaches Knew About Adidas Payments

Billy Preston, a former Kansas men’s basketball player who never got to play in a single collegiate game due to his involvement in an ongoing NCAA investigation, recently spoke out and alleged that the Jayhawks staff knew about the payments made by Adidas to his mother, Nicole Player.

While speaking on ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast The Bag Game this week, Preston was asked if the Kansas staff knew that Adidas associate T.J. Gassnola, who said during a 2018 trial stemming from an FBI investigation into college basketball corruption that he paid around $89,000 to Player, was paying his family money. Preston, who was supposed to begin his collegiate career in 2017, said that the staff did indeed know. 

“They wasn’t blind to that. They weren’t blind to that at all,” Preston said.

However, Gassnola testified back in 2018 that he made sure the Kansas coaching staff was unaware of the payments. The university reiterated the same sentiment in a statement in 2020 regarding the NCAA allegations, saying “the University was a victim of Gassnola’s and [Adidas executive James] Gatto’s crimes.” 

In the podcast, Preston admitted he didn’t like the school using the word “victim” because Kansas was part of the reason he met with Adidas in the first place.

“They ain’t no victim; they knew what was going on, too,” Preston said. “They put the whole thing together. They set it up. Like, KU was the whole reason we even met.”

Player emphasized a similar sentiment to her son, saying that she and Preston’s family were the “victims” in this situation.

“Victim? If anybody was a victim it was the family that Adidas preyed on,” she said on the podcast. “We left the school and weathered the storm and never one time did I come out and say we’re victims. When the reality is, if anybody is a victim here, we’re victims of a corrupt system. We’re a victim of college corruption, corruption that has gone on for decades before us and will continue to go on decades after us.”

The college basketball corruption trial involving this situation ended in 2018, and Gatto, former Adidas consultant Merl Code and former sports agent Christian Dawkins were found guilty of seven counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. 

The NCAA continued to investigate Kansas, finding in 2019 that the school had committed five Level I violations, the NCAA’s most serious level for infractions. The case is still ongoing with the NCAA’s Independent Accountability Resolution Process since July 2020 and Kansas just had one of its hearings in front of the IARP over the past weekend, Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde reported on Wednesday.

Based on some of the findings from the 2017 investigation, both head coach Bill Self and assistant coach Kurtis Townsend served a four-game suspension to start the 2022–23 season. Additionally the program issued self-imposed sanctions, which included implementing various recruiting restrictions during the 2022–23 and 2023–24 academic years.